Hernán Casternaux Serrano, 31 years old, was a native of the Cuatro Caminos town, Santiago de Cuba province.
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba – Hernán Casternaux Serrano, 31 years old, a native of the Cuatro Caminos town, in the Songo La Maya municipality, province of Santiago de Cuba, was shot dead in the early hours of this Sunday, January 11, 2026.
According to the testimony of a cousin of the victim, Hernán was at a party when a fight broke out between several people. “He went to get away and one of those who were fighting went and looked for a gun. He shot him in the head,” he said.
The shot was fatal. Hernán died instantly, while the attacker fled the scene. Until the time of writing this note, he had not been captured, despite a strong police deployment in the area.
Another person close to the incident, who preferred to remain anonymous, assured that, although he does not know the murderer personally, he does know his family. “I understand that he is a criminal, who has been imprisoned several times,” he said. His statement once again puts on the table a recurring problem in Cuba: the fragility of the laws and the few sentences received by those who repeat criminal acts, a factor that fuels the spiral of violence on the Island.
Those who knew Hernán describe him as a calm, family-oriented young man and father of two little girls. His cousin, Zenia Kindelan Serrano, expressed the family’s pain through a publication in Facebook:
“Today I woke up with the saddest news in the world. They took Hernán from us: my cousin, my brother; the noblest person, with a wide smile and a thunderous laugh. It is well said that envy is bad, they couldn’t handle his brilliance. The murderer is going to pay. He left two girls without a father and the souls of many people destroyed.”
The tragedy surrounding Hernán’s death is compounded by an equally violent family history. In 2019, his father, Alexis Casternaux Medina, was murdered in the nearby town of Ti Arriba. At that time, CubaNet public about the case and revealed that the man was beaten to death and later hung from a tree with barbed wire. It was learned that his romantic partner, along with three others involved, murdered him to steal 70 thousand pesos that he had recently received for a harvest. Currently, the woman is serving a prison sentence for that crime.
“How cruel fate has been for those men. What great pain: first the father and now the son. It seems like something out of a movie, but no, sadly it is reality,” lamented another source very close to the victim.
Hernán Casternaux Serrano’s funeral takes place in his own home and, later, he will be buried in the Santana cemetery, a neighboring town.
